I met Carol Bodensteiner in April, and I recently read her book, Growing up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl.
What a treat! Bodensteiner is a wonderful storyteller. She shows readers what she saw as a girl growing up on a farm in Iowa in the 1950s — from learning how to drive a tractor to the meaning of making a promise and keeping your word. Even if you didn’t grow up on a farm, this is a great coming-of-age story.
I got to meet Carol Bodensteiner at the Talbot Belmond Public Library on Tuesday night. I had her book already but hadn’t read it yet. I was compiling a list of Iowa authors for an article and found that she’d be speaking about 45 minutes away. I couldn’t pass that up, could I?
Bodensteiner talked about her book Growing up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl, and she read some passages that had us laughing out loud. She listened as we told some of our own stories of mean chickens, 10-cent movies and amazing mothers. Bodensteiner is warm, charming and funny. I’m reading her book next.
Here she is signing books.
I’ll post the list of authors after the article’s published.
I just finished reading Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. Gah. Why didn’t anyone tell me not to read this right after reading The Reader?
This was on the last page with an odd “coming soon from Vintage Books” heading:
In Young Hearts Crying, Yates movingly portrays a man and a woman from their courtship and marriage in the 1950s to their divorce in the 70s, chronicling their heartbreaking attempts to reach their highest ambitions. Michael Davenport dreams of being a poet after returning home from World War II Europe, and at first he and his new wife, Lucy, enjoy their life together. But as the decades pass and the success of others creates an oppressive fear of failure in both Michael and Lucy, their once-bright future gives way to a life of adultery and isolation. With empathy and grace, Yates creates a poignant novel of the desires and disasters of a tragic, hopeful couple.
Know what? Yates covered plenty of that ground — and more — in Revolutionary Road. Nah. I think I’m good.
I just finished reading The Reader by Bernhard Schlink. I didn’t like anyone in it. Was I supposed to?
I just finished reading In Cod We Trust by Eric Dregni, a Norwegian-American who spent a year in Norway on a Fulbright Fellowship.
I just finished reading Duma Key by Stephen King. Anyone else read it? (Besides my brother. I read his copy.)
Yeah, probably not the best thing to read in the middle of your first brutal Iowa winter when you’re missing the comfort of Tampa. Either that or the perfect thing to read. Maybe si maybe no.
In any case, it made me miss Tampa, The Bone and trying to run into Stephen King at Skipper’s. Sigh. Thanks, Steve.
I just finished reading Involuntary Joy: A Story of Unexpected Rebirth by Joy M. Newcom.
Up next: Duma Key.
1) What did you read in 2008?
2) Anything not on my list that you would recommend?
Here’s what I read in 2008.
I started several others that I haven’t finished yet, and I may have missed a few.
Actually, I just finished reading that one, Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression by Mildred Armstrong Kalish. It’s a great book.
I’m reading this one now: Involuntary Joy by Joy M. Newcom.
I recently read Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers by Gordon Neufeld, Ph.D., and Gabor Maté, M.D.
I picked it up because Izzy mentioned it. She said Christina recommended it to her.
Good book.
I just finished reading Patriotic Grace by Peggy Noonan.
Who knew I’d find similar quotes, opinions and themes to what Studs Terkel wrote in his memoir?
Noonan: Part of what I’m saying has been said, better, by Bruce Cole, the head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, in a speech at New York University in the summer of 2002. He warned of “American amnesia,” noted a study of students at 55 elite universities that found over a third couldn’t identify the U.S. Constitution as establishing the division of powers in our government; 40 percent couldn’t place the American Civil War in the correct half century; and two-thirds didn’t know what the word “Reconstruction” referred to. “Citizens kept ignorant of their history are robbed of the richness of their heritage. . . . A nation that does not know why it exists, or what it stands for, cannot be expected to long endure. . . . We cannot expect that a nation which has lost its memory will keep its vision.”
Terkel: Memory. How can we have memory if we don’t have any knowledge? If we have no history, no memory of what happened yesterday, let alone what happened fifty years ago? . . . What happens to all Alzheimer’s sufferers is tragic. What I’m talking about is what I call a national Alzheimer’s — a whole country has lost its memory. When there’s no yesterday, a national memory becomes more and more removed from what it once was, and forgets what it once wanted to be. We’re sinking under our national Alzheimer’s disease. With Alzheimer’s you forget what you did yesterday. With Alzheimer’s finally, you forget not only what you did, but also who you are. In many respects, we have forgotten who we are.
